Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Video: Forecasting the Future of Public Media, from Silverdocs

Pat Aufderheide, the brainiac who runs the Center for Social Media at American University, put together a fun panel at Silverdocs last month to try to forecast the future of public media. The video is now available here. Responding to Pat's scary/fascinating/hopeful scenarios for the next five years were:

The video below is the first segment... not sure if the other segments will play automatically... but the entire session ran about 90 minutes. That should supply plenty of Holiday Weekend Viewing Pleasure.

1 Comments:

I think there are very few ideas that you can hang a hat on these days because the dynamics of the world are changing so quickly. We have the website, the blog, the Facebook page, etc, but I truly don't believe that it is helping gain ground with our audience...after the movie comes out, yes it is great for them, but then that is the movie that drove them to the site, not the other way around.

One idea you can definitely hang a hat on:

People want to watch what they what, where, they want it, when they want, and in as many forms as their are people. Every piece of media is going to have an audience of varying size that will want to see it on everything from the big screen down to their phone.

Social media is huge now, but so were CBs. Feature films were made about CBs. Action movies were made about CBers. How long did that last? We are now in a culture that is driven by tech that is evolving and changing so quickly that, IMHO, nobody has a grasp on where it is heading and the current social media platforms will last less time than CBs.

Hollywood is spending a ton on super hi definition 3D. They have their best and brightest working on that crisp clear image future while YouTube (which IMHO has some of the worst compression and virtually trashes your media) has the public's eye- for the moment. IMHO, this expensive 3D tech is a glass ceiling so the PTB/studio system can maintain control when they are obviously losing their grip.

The press, blogs, e-zines, etc will be interested when you start doing something interesting. I just got a call from Australia from an animation company that heard about us and our building our company from our community disadvantaged kids. They wanted to follow our model.

My advice? A riff on Frank Zappa's "Shut up and play yer guitar" Go make your movie. It is easier than ever before.

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